Preaching and Teaching

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
March 22, 2009

Text: John 3:14-21

John records Jesus as saying, “…the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light….” We live in one of those times when it is abundantly clear why people chose to live in the darkness. People made, literally, billions of dollars working in the dark recesses of our credit markets. Terrorists work in dark places building their bombs. Abusers beat family members behind closed doors. Drug users go into dark alleys to make their purchases. Drug cartels use the night the way a master violinist uses a Stradivarius.

The darkness is cover for those who do nefarious things. As Jesus puts it, “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” People labor in the dark intentionally, methodically, hurrying to accomplish their dirty work before the light can expose them.

So, many folks love the darkness because it aids their cause. They profit from it. There they are able to do things no one would tolerate if their deeds came to light.

The more challenging people to understand are those who live in the dark not because it directly profits them but because of some neurotic, deeply seated need. They have affairs not for because they enjoy sex but because the darkness makes it feel illicit, clandestine. They cheat on their taxes year after year after year not because they need the money but simply to see how far they can push their luck.

Frankly, this latter group represents the folks who come into my office. I don’t get to talk with the Adolph Hitler’s of the world, the drug lord who doesn’t think twice about beheading a problem employee, in other words, the folks who profit from the darkness.

But the people who choose to lead secretive lives, the people who do self-destructive things in the darkness? In droves, they come to me, other pastors, rabbis, priests, and therapists. They arrive filled with shame, guilt, and self-loathing. They live in the dark but don’t understand why they choose to do so. Key word: choose. Their behavior is a choice and they know it is a choice. What confuses them is why they choose the darkness over the light night after night after pitch black night.

These folks are confused because they spend much of their lives in the light. They know what it is like to enjoy the energy and creativity of the light. In the light, Eliott Spitzer was a crime buster. Bill Clinton signed progressive legislation. Martha Stewart taught people to enjoy homemaking.

But something draws these folks back into the dark—time after time after time. They circle the darkness, debating whether to re-enter it and almost always do.

I guess this is one of the reasons I love biographies. I am fascinated at what causes people—bright, creative, good people—to move from the light into the darkness. What caused Bill Clinton repeatedly to leave an incredibly productive, successful life to engage in tawdry, meaningless affairs? What compelled Eliot Spitzer to leave a beautiful family and successful career to meet prostitutes in secretive places? What made Martha Stewart descend into the dark world of insider trading?

Each of these individuals is a very, very smart person. Somewhere in their psyche, they had to know they were going to get caught. They had to know that someone would shine a bright spotlight on them at some point or another. Bernard Madoff stood before the court and acknowledged that he knew he was going to get caught. And yet, these folks kept going back into the darkness. They couldn’t stop.

Some say such figures are drunk with power, arrogantly certain they are above the law. Maybe. For a few. But for most, it is far, far more complicated than that. For many, the darkness has an appeal, allure, attraction even they don’t understand. But go there they do. And once there, as Jesus put it, people begin to love the darkness.

For some, I think it is a way of affirming a deeply rooted, nagging, lingering suspicion that they are bad people. A chorus made of up of their family, friends, and co-workers tell them they are good. But deep down inside they don’t believe a word of it. They are convinced the praise is rooted in a lie.

” I’m just fooling everyone,” they say to themselves, “I’m no good.” They then proceed to prove to themselves they are no good. In the darkness, they drink too much, cheat on their partner, do illegal things at work, all the while saying to themselves, “See, I’m not as good as people think I am.”

What is tragic is the fact that they are good. God makes each of us good. We can act bad. We can act real bad. But we are still good. Created in the image of our good God, we can’t undo the goodness we are.

Indeed, living in the dark is learned behavior. Because it isn’t our natural state of being. This is why children scream when the lights go off. It is why some adults need night lights in the house. Medical research reveals that some of us get depressed when we aren’t exposed to enough light. Our natural place is in the light.

However, as we learn to live in the dark, we grow comfortable with these private, shadowy places. The more time we spend in the darkness, the more comfortable we become with it. Slowly but surely, the dark feels like our home, a home we love, just as some kidnaped people grow to love their abductors.

The transformation is so profound that at some point, when we emerge into the light, we are blinded by it. Staggered by the light, we grope our way back into the darkness.

Last week, I went to a church in Northern Virginia to participate in a debate over the ordination of LGBT folks in our denomination. Being around you all for so long, I am always a bit shocked when I hear what some church folks have to say on the matter. When I said the church needs to welcome LGBT people, one 30-something woman said she felt called to protect the church and her children from homosexuals. She felt called to exclude them. When I said we should listen to people under the age of 25, most of whom just don’t care about homosexuality as an issue, a 40-something said she thinks the morals of young people are repugnant so I should stop citing them as support for my position.

Driving home, I was processing the experience. I began to think of the debate in terms of light and darkness. As I see it, the church is emerging from a cave in which we were born and have spent most of our life. It is a deep, dark place filled with sexism, racism, homophobia, and perverted forms of nationalism. Not able to look at these sins in the light of God’s love, we have acted out of fear in the darkness.

When we have these debates, people momentarily come out into the light. We don’t all agree. But at least we are talking and thinking about homosexuality in a healthy environment, in the light of God’s Word. Sadly, when the debate ends, a lot of folks run back into the cave. However, gratefully, more and more don’t run back. We stay in the light and wonder why we ever chose to live in that cave. As a result, the church inches its way toward holiness and a healthy recognition of our sinfulness.

As I look around this country today and consider what is happening, I think the lights have come on. We were living in the dark. Most of us had no idea what was going on behind closed doors in the worlds of finance, intelligence gathering and elsewhere. But suddenly, the lights are on. And as always happens when lights go on, the cockroaches are running for cover.

As we stand in the light, some of what we see isn’t pretty. In addition, the brightness of the light hurts our eyes. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to step into the light.

But it will be ok. We’ll get used to it. We’ll adjust. And when we do, we will begin to feel the joy and power that come with life in the light.

However, a moment will come when we will need to make a decision. Do we stay in the light or do we crawl back into the dark cave? Do we deal with what we see or shroud it with darkness so it seems to go away? It will be a moment of truth that defines our life—personally, nationally, as a church.

Every addict has been there. I talk about addicts a lot because I think most of us are addicted to something. Generally speaking, addicts are “us” not “them.”

At some point, most addicts sober up. We stop drinking or eating too much. We stop watching pornography or sleeping with anyone who will say “yes.”

However, at some point, there is a moment of truth. The darkness beckons, calls us home. As we look at the darkness, we remember how comfortable the darkness was, how comfortable it might be again. Indeed, as Jesus would say, there is a part of us, a powerful part of us that is in love with the darkness.

At that moment, we need God like we rarely need God. Then, right then, we need to trust God, not the dealer, not the bag of potato chips, not the compulsive need to buy something. We need to trust God’s judgement that we are good, not that all-too-familiar voice within us saying we are bad so go ahead and act bad.

We need to believe that, indeed, we are meant to live in the light. We need to believe God’s Word that the light has overcome the darkness. There is no need for us to go there anymore.

Now living in the light isn’t always easy, especially at first. People today are having a difficult time accepting the realities that have suddenly been illuminated over the past year. We don’t have the money, power or flexibility that we thought we had—nationally, as a church, as individuals.

Some just don’t want to accept this fact. Others want us to make quick decisions even though our eyes haven’t yet fully adjusted to seeing in the light. But if we will allow ourselves to get used to seeing and living in the light, as used to the light as we are to the dark, we will learn to deal with the sometimes harsh realities exposed by the light.

On the whole, I think the aging process is a wonderful thing. I would much rather be John Wimberly the 61-year-old than John Wimberly the 21- or 31-year-old. But there are some challenges. One of them is the way our bodies change. Because as we age, our bodies move away from what society defines as beautiful.

To deal with clients who come to him with issues around their aging bodies, a therapist friend of mine has a little exercise he recommends. He tells his client to go home, take off all his or her clothes and stand in front of a mirror. “Stand there for a long time. Turn around. Look at yourself from different angles,” he says.

If they follow his advice, they will see their bodies in the light rather than trying to hide them in the dark. Gradually, they will begin to ignore what the fashion magazines or Hollywood tells us is beautiful, realizing instead that their bodies are downright amazing gifts.

If we look in the mirror with our reduced 401ks, flat lined salaries, and declining home values, at first, it is tough to keep looking. We want to look away. But if we stick with it, we will see what we are. We are still very, very blessed. Standing in the light, understanding who we are, is the key to any healthy growth into the future.

We love the darkness because we don’t have to have the kinds of confrontations with ourselves that occur when the lights are on. We can live in a world of illusion and delusion. We can pretend that some things exist that don’t exist and pretend that some things don’t exist that do exist. We know that when the lights come on, our worlds of make-believe are caput.

Jesus invited us to step out of our make-believe worlds—worlds where we think we are the mightiest power on earth, immune to what happened to every other empire that thought it was the mightiest power on earth; worlds where we think we can prove our worth at work or abuse our bodies without paying a price for it.

Jesus said, “Follow me. Let’s walk in the light.” As we walk with him into the light, we are going to see things about ourselves and others that aren’t pretty. But the unpleasant realities are there whether we see them or not. When we ignore them, they gain a power over us they don’t possess in the light. The light has the power to defuse them

So, yes, living in the light, we will see some unpleasant things. But we will also see amazing, miraculous things about ourselves and others. Most important, we will see that we are good, women and men whose destiny it is to live in the light. The light. It is a great place to live.

Let us pray: Gracious God, you call us to live in the light. This invitation fills us with fear. How will we be exposed? What will we be exposed in others? May we have the courage to find out. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, DC
March 15, 2009

Text: John 2:13-22

 A couple of weeks ago, I was leading a conference, and this wonderful pastor came up to me and said, “Thank you for your words. They are prophetic. Really.” I immediately became uncomfortable. Whenever people tell me that, I feel ill-at-ease. I don’t like it, because to me, the biblical image of a prophet is someone who strikes me as very, very angry.

Let me tell you something about myself. I don’t lose my temper a lot. My sister, for instance, will tell you that she has never once seen me lose my temper. I get upset about things, I might cry about things, but it takes me a really, really long time to blow up or to yell. There were a few volatile members of my family when I was growing up. I was the by far the youngest and the smallest. Since there seemed to be enough drama going on in the house without me adding to it, I usually took the role of the peacemaker. I sat back. I listened. I tried to negotiate with all of the parties.

The role was a good one for me, and the skills that I learned from a very young age have become important for me as a pastor. In counseling situations, in organizational management, in conflict resolution, I have the ability to hear all of the parties and build bridges of understanding between them. I am keenly aware of body language. All of these things have been very important as a pastor, writer, and consultant.

But there was a point in my life when the peacemaker role was not working for me. I was going through a difficult time at work, and I started having all of these stress- related illnesses. I suddenly had to face the reality that I could not spend my entire life negotiating the feelings of everyone around me, because in the process, I was never able or willing to express my own emotions. I certainly didn’t know how to communicate my anger. It wasn’t only my family role, but also my role as a woman in our society.

I am always amazed when I’m in a meeting, and there can be a man who is yelling at the top of his lungs and banging his fist on the table, and no one says anything about it. But if my voice quivers slightly, I usually hear later about how I completely lost it, and how I burst out into tears. And I think, why, in our culture, are we completely comfortable with a man yelling in a meeting? Why are those emotions acceptable, but we can have such a difficult time when a woman expresses any emotion at all?

Remember this on the campaign trail during the last election? There was that one day during the primaries when I was reading in the newspaper about how Hillary Clinton completely lost it. People were talking about how the stress of the campaign had finally broken her. So, I searched the Internet for the footage, and I found Clinton, who had a flash of weariness and concern, and a barely detectable tremor in her voice.

How strange it was, especially when John McCain had a famously powerful temper, but we were, for the most part, completely comfortable with that. Yet when a powerful woman showed the slightest bit of emotion, she had lost it.

I am very much a product of our culture. We all know that word we call women when they express anger. Often the only acceptable response that women can have to anger is to cry. And when we cry, we are immediately seen as victims. We are disempowered, and later we hear later how we completely and totally lost it.

So, I wasn’t sure what to do with my own anger. I began to negotiate with myself. Trying to tell myself the other side of the story. Trying pack all of that stress and fury into a neat little package until it sat in my stomach causing me terrible pain.

I tell you all of this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s because I think a lot of us, men and women alike, have difficulty with our anger. We are not sure how to identify it and we don’t know exactly what to do with it. Second, I want you to know exactly how uncomfortable I am with this story. I have heard it all of my life, and the older that I get, the more uncomfortable it makes me.

This is the third Sunday in Lent, and during this time, we are on a journey with Jesus, this young, passionate man. Jesus was a prophet in the truest sense of the word. There were people surrounding him all the time, plotting how they could trick him, scheming how they could push him over a cliff, and bribing his friends to turn him in. Jesus was aware that he was in the center of these swirling plots. I am a couple of years older than Jesus was, and during this time I often wonder what it must have been like for him to realize that he was going to be killed. This wise man, whose whole reason in life was to show the love of God, who had done nothing but try to help those who surrounded him. It must have made him very angry.            

Throughout the history of biblical studies, there has been a search for the real Jesus, the historical Jesus. And before they were written down, they were a part of a strong oral history. Churches met in houses, they shared what they had with one another. And told stories to one another, remembering what Jesus did, and they read and wrote letters to one another. And those of you who have been with your partner for a long time know how it is, when you’re in a gathering and you are telling a story and your partner interrupts and adds a bit of information. And you don’t actually remember that exact piece of information. And you might have a fight or a laugh about it later that night, depending on your mood.

It was the same thing happening with this group of young men and women, who worked together, traveled with one another, lived with one another. When they began to write these things down, one person had one particular perspective, and another person had another perspective. So, we have four very different gospels. It is the same story, about the same man, but each one has a different take on it.

That is because in ancient times, there was the author of a text, who often worked on pieces of parchment. The parchment was expensive, so there wasn’t any such thing as margins or headers. People wrote to the very end of the page, and they often didn’t have much space between the words. And then, often the parchment would get damaged. Since there was no printing press, scribes were writing down the texts. And they were very careful to get every word correct, and there were all kinds of systems in place to make sure that they did, but sometimes mistakes would happen. Sometimes a scribe would read a word, and they were not sure what the word was, so they would replace it with another word. Or, sometimes the men wouldn’t like what they read, and so they would change it just a little bit, or in the case of Mark, someone added an entire ending to it.

Out of all of this, scholars often look for the historic Jesus. In the midst of these different stories, what can we point to and say that Jesus definitely did this. And there’s one theory that if we read the story, and it makes us incredibly uncomfortable, then there’s a really good chance that Jesus actually did it.

This is one of those stories. This is one of those things that most people point to and say that Jesus definitely did. I know I’m uncomfortable with it. I don’t like the idea of Jesus coming into a space of worship, overturning tables, and the idea of him making a whip really freaks me out.

Yet, here it is. Jesus, with all of his prophetic fury, is doing just that. And I wonder, why it is? Why is he so angry?

When I was growing up as a conservative Baptist, I was always told that it was because people were selling things on temple property. The temple was holy and it was only for worshiping God. So the elders of the church would become furious if any poor pig-tailed girl tried to sell scout cookies during coffee hour.

And I’ve heard other explanations. The animals were being sold so that people could make sacrifices, and so there is the thought that poor people were being charged too much. They were being cheated. Or, that the priests were profiting from the sales, and they were becoming rich from selling God’s grace. 

But the thing that struck me as I read this passage was that Jesus was angry, and something mystical seems to be happening in all of this, because Jesus not only embodies this prophetic fury, but he tells us, in a strange puzzle that that he is the temple of God. And later still, in the letters of the early church, we learn that we are the temple of God. And when we gather in this place, we carry this knowledge within us. We know that the church is not this place that we meet every Sunday morning, it is not our building or our assets, but it is the people who are gathered here.

So it seems that Jesus has a love and a passion that is not just because the house of God has been defiled in some manner, but because after traveling to this holiest of all holy places, Jesus finds a building and a marketplace filled with smelly animals. Not only that, but Jesus realizes that the temple is not God’s only dwelling place, but somehow he was God’s temple. It is almost as if Jesus realizes that the temple has become destroyed, and he realizes that he will be destroyed.

That must have made Jesus very angry.

We all become angry at some time in our lives. We all get wrapped up in love and disappointment, and a fury can kindle within us. We all need to learn what to do with it.

I knew something had to change when my stomach was hurting so badly, and I was pretty sure that I was burning an ulcer in there with all of that battery acid my body seemed to be producing. So, I went to see a therapist who told me that I needed to get in touch with my anger, that I needed exercise my anger, to find a place where I could express it. My husband and I installed a wood floor in our home, and the whole time that we were doing it, I would try to recall the things that made me angry and channel all of that fury into the hard physical labor.

I would recall stories in my mind of people who harmed me or my loved ones, and I would let that rage fill me, and it would come out of me with great force as I hammered, sandpapered and sawed. It did feel good at first, to have a physical expression of my rage that I had been holding inside of me for three decades.

The problem was that the anger would make my vision red and blurry, and my I could not do things that needed such exact attention, and I would end up trying to drive in a nail, and I would hit my thumb with the hammer. When I would exercise my anger, it never went away, and I was never relieved for that raw intensity. When I would recall stories over and over in my mind, the frustration just seemed to multiply inside of me like a wildfire that kept spreading.

It was when I learned to do something else that I was able to move from anger to forgiveness, and finally peace. I learned to identify my anger through walks in the woods, or through journaling. When I found it, I did not tell it to go away. I did not explain to myself that I didn’t really have any reason to be angry, or that the other person had a reason to treat me badly, or that I deserved it for some reason. I did not play the hundred tricks on myself that we so often do.

But I closed my eyes, and I imagined taking that fury and placing it upon my lap. I learned to embrace it, and love it, and soothe it, just as I would love and embrace and soothe my very own child. And, after a very long while, I was able to let it go.

There will be times that our love for God, our passion for one another, we will become angry.  There will be times when our reaction to some thing that has happened inside of our very own lives, will make us angry. There are forces in our society that will want to contain us when we become angry. There are times when we should defend those who are victims of the anger of others. Especially in this very scary time, when our anxieties are high about the economic crisis, people are losing their jobs, and fury can begin to overwhelm us, this will be a time when we will need to identify, hold, caress, and love those parts of ourselves that we would rather ignore.

And in this time, we know that have a God, Jesus Christ in the flesh, who was human enough to become angry. And so it will be for us. Now, may God give us wisdom, a bit of prophetic zeal, and eventual peace.

Through God, our Creator,

            Jesus, our Liberator,

                        And the Holy Spirit, our Comforter.  Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
March 8, 2009

Text: Mark 8:31-38

I sometimes think I don’t preach about Jesus enough. Well, actually, I preach about Jesus every week. His life and teachings inspire every single word I utter from this pulpit. But I don’t use Jesus’ name as much as some preachers do. Maybe I worry about this because I listen to a fundamentalist preacher on the way down here every Sunday morning. He say Jesus every third word.

So just to prove to myself, if nobody else, that I can talk about Jesus for an entire sermon, this morning I’m going to talk a lot about Jesus. At last count, I will use Jesus’ name thirty times in this sermon. Count the personal pronouns referring to Jesus and it gets crazy!

The lectionary makes my task easy because our Gospel lesson gives us about as much insight into Jesus as any passage in all of Scripture. In it, Jesus asks us, “For what will it profit you to gain the whole world but forfeit your lives? What can the world give you in return for your lives?”

Jesus wasn’t talking about gaining or losing heaven. He was talking about gaining or losing our integrity while we are on earth. He was questioning why people compromise their integrity short term thinking that it won’t damage them long term.

In contrast, with Jesus, I envision a person who didn’t have a real difficult time making hard decisions. He was too clear to become confused; too focused to lose focus.

Now, I don’t think Jesus liked all his decisions he had to make. He certainly didn’t like the idea of dying. He asked God if there was another way. When no other way appeared, Jesus knew that if his life was to have any integrity his way would necessarily travel through the Cross. After all, how could Jesus urge his followers to make enormous sacrifices if he wasn’t willing to do the same?

Oftentimes people say to me, “I know what Jesus would do. But so what? I’m not Jesus. I can’t live like Jesus.”

Why not? For the most part, it is because we lack his soul deep integrity. We don’t lack his faith, hope or love. We lack his integrity.

At the heart of personal integrity lies a clear and certain knowledge of who and whose we are. Jesus knew who he was: God’s child—loved and valued beyond any reasonable expectation. It is hard to overstate the importance of this simple yet profound foundation of spiritual wholeness.

Before I am John Wimberly husband, father, brother, pastor, potter, or agitator, I am John Wimberly child of God. Before I am loved by my family or friends, I am loved by God. God’s love of me is as perfect and consistent as God is perfect and consistent.

Knowing God loves me, my life is built on the single most important piece of information in life: we are loved—not just now but forever, not just when we are good but always. Why is this so important? Because people can let us down. People we trust with our hearts can walk all over them. Without a soul-deep faith that God loves us, personal crises will cause us to question whether we are loveable. Such self-questioning is a crisis that makes the tanking of the stock market look like a walk in the park.

The Apostle Paul had one huge, eternally true insight: we can’t prove our self-worth. We can’t prove we are loveable. We can only believe we are loved by God as an act of faith.

When we believe God loves us, no matter what, we are able to cope with the heart breaks human relationships generate. However, if we do not possess a bedrock belief that we are loved by God, how do we sustain faith in ourselves when humans tell us we are not loveable? We can’t. We end up in the dark existentialist world of no exits.

Kierkegaard talked about a “leap of faith.” He meant a leap to faith in God. But frankly, that is the easy part. A much more hair-raising leap involves believing that God loves us. Because, for many, no leap is greater than the leap to a belief that we are loveable.

Why is it so difficult to believe we are loved by God and able to be loved by others? We may have had parents who gave us mixed messages about our love ability. Maybe someone we loved as an adult stomped on our heart, crushing our faith in ourselves. My guess is that some day we will discover there is something in our biochemistry that makes it difficult for some people to affirm their own worth/love ability.

Whatever the reason, many folks are simply unable to make the leap of faith to the idea that God loves them. Jesus did. He had a rock solid faith that God loved him and every other human being. It was at the heart of his integrity.

When we follow Jesus in accepting God’s love of us, we make the first and most important step toward personal integrity. Our feet firmly on the bedrock of God’s love for us, the next challenge is to understand where we are headed. Again, let us look at Jesus. He never doubted where he was going.

In contrast to Jesus, many of us lose our integrity because we keep changing directions and destinations in life. Not sure where we are going, we compromise our integrity in hopes that compromising our core values will lead somewhere better. “Perhaps if I do this or do that, I’ll be happy,” we think.

If we put our search for direction in the context of our faith, there is no question where we are headed. We are going back to the place from whence we came. We are headed in a straight line back to the God who loves us.

One of the things I used to love to do was track my stocks on the Wall Street Journal website. Used to. It was so much fun.

In the research section of the Journal, I can pull up a web page for a specific stock. There I find a graph showing the stock’s performance for the day. I can then change the display and get a graph that shows me the performance over a year, ten years or whatever.

What is fascinating is that the longer time frame I select, the more clear the direction of the stock becomes. The ups and downs of any given day or even any given year morph into straight lines, revealing clear trends. With good companies, the line goes upward. With floundering companies, the direction goes downward. For a few, the line is horizontal.

So it is with our lives. On a day to day or even year to year basis, the direction of our lives may zig and zag significantly. But the longer the time line we use to evaluate the direction of our lives, the more definitive the direction becomes. We are going home to God.

We can move from city to city, relationship to relationship, job to job. We can do well, poorly or something in between. But we are all headed back to God. Period.

Given the direction of our lives is set, predestined, if you will, the choices we make in life have to do not with where we are going but with the nature, quality and character of our integrity. Our choices are not about where we end up. Jesus said the real choices are about what we do as we travel back to God. Do our choices reflect personal integrity? Or, do they reflect what the author of Ecclesiastes called “vanity and a striving after the wind?”

Integrity is not something we discover. It is something we create through choices we make as we walk toward our ultimate destination: God. Integrity, said Jesus, is created as we put our lives at risk for God’s sake. We take chances.

When Mrs. Obama visited us Thursday to serve a lunch, she was witnessing the results of people who took risks over the past 26 years to create and sustain Miriam’s Kitchen, people who possessed profound integrity. Some of you have heard the following story but it is worth telling again.

We started Miriam’s Kitchen back in our former home at 19^th and H Streets. Starting the program was a significant and calculated risk because we had a building in dire need of repair. In 1983, we still had the original plumbing, electrical panel and boiler that had been installed in the 1930s.

To discuss having the program located at Western, we had a congregational meeting. After some pro and con, back and forth conversation, one of our long time members and leaders, Forrest Agnew, stood up to speak. When Forrest spoke, everyone listened.

Honestly, Forrest scared me to death. He was a conservative man from the delta region of Mississippi who moved to D.C. during the depression to work in FDR’s expanding government. Forrest never said much and people who don’t say much make me nervous. Furthermore, since I had only been at Western for a few months, I wasn’t sure whether or not he liked me. After all, I was a flaming, screaming Wisconsin liberal and he was a down home boy from the delta.

Forrest cleared his throat and told his fellow members, “I think it is a huge mistake to have a feeding program here. This building is too old to handle that kind of stress. We don’t have restrooms for the folks we would serve. Our plumbing will continually back up (which it did). We don’t have proper fire protection systems.” He then paused, “But, John has been preaching all these sermons on feeding the hungry. And after much prayer, I have concluded that we have no choice but to feed the homeless. It is what God commands us to do. So I will vote ‘yes.’” He sat down. There was no voting ‘no’ after what Forrest said. Twenty six years of serving the homeless has followed that meeting.

It was among the most amazing moments I have witnessed in my ministry. It was like watching Jesus be transfigured on the mountaintop. Forrest glistened and glowed with integrity. I am confident we will see the same kind of integrity on display in the months ahead as we think through our current financial struggles.

Decades ago in Bethesda, I worked a lot with abused women. It was both depressing and inspiring. Depressing because it is so hard to imagine a person striking their spouse, let alone beating them bloody. Inspiring because I observed integrity the likes of which still makes me shake my head in amazement.

Many of the women lived in luxurious homes in Potomac and drove expensive cars. But as Jesus said, what does it profit us if we gain the whole world and forfeit our lives. And so they walked away from their wealthy abusers. They couldn’t compromise their integrity any longer by living in an abusive setting.

I have known people who quit jobs rather than do something that compromised their integrity; students who refused to cheat when everyone else was doing it; young people who refused to get sucked into the drug culture even when their best friends invited them; soldiers who refused orders they believed to be immoral; pastors who refused to stop talking about something from the pulpit when told to do so by a major donor; physicians who refused to perform unnecessary medical procedures; construction workers who refused to use watered-down cement. The list goes on. Following Jesus’ recommendation, they refused to profit from something that would compromise their integrity.

Now Jesus was quite clear both in his words and the realities of his life that leading a life of integrity is not necessarily a Way to get ahead in the world. If Jesus had played ball, he could have been the most famous religious leader of his day, lived a long life and had a memorial service filled to the overflowing with his admirers. If Jesus had chosen not to include women and sinners in his core leadership team, he probably could have survived. But he couldn’t do any of those things because they would have compromised his integrity. As a result, Jesus got nailed to a cross.

As you know, I do not believe that leading a life of integrity necessarily leads to suffering. Many business people make a lot of money running businesses with integrity. They promise something and deliver it.

I read a great story about Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame baseball star and World War II fighter pilot. Not everyone liked him. But he was known for his success and his integrity as a ballplayer.

Williams refused to be a showboat. In his last at bat during his last game at Fenway Park, Williams hit a home run. In an amazing essay, from which I now quote, John Updike described what happened next, “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

Williams was later asked why he didn’t respond to the crowd. He replied that, for a second, he considered doffing his cap but thought it would be out of character. Integrity is a beautiful thing to behold whether it leads to a cross or worldly success.

God lifted up Jesus in our midst as the ultimate example of human integrity, a flesh and blood role model for each and every one of us. Jesus was not afraid to make a compromise. But he wouldn’t compromise himself. He wasn’t afraid to change positions or sides in a debate. But he would never leave God’s side. Facing every possible test, confronting every conceivable challenge to his integrity, Jesus remained as steadfast as the God to whom he prayed.

If we don’t know what integrity looks like, we will never possess it. How would you and I define a life of integrity for ourselves? What would our lives look like if they were filled with Christ-like integrity?

Each of us is headed back to a God who loves us unconditionally. As we make the journey, may our choices reflect the integrity that flows from trust in such Good News.

Let us pray: Gracious God, help us to create lives filled with integrity. As we do so, may we feel the joy that comes with being a consistent, persistent disciple of Jesus. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
March 1, 2009

Text: Genesis 9:8-17

At some point in ancient times, a Great Flood may have happened. But, frankly, we’re not sure. National Geographic and others have reported on a theory that there was a flood from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Other scholars have argued there may have been catastrophic river flooding in the Middle East. But there is not enough historical, geological or archaeological evidence to verify it absolutely.

However, one thing we do know definitively: the ancients were sure of it. The Hindus and Greeks both told of a massive flood in their mythology as did the Epic of Gilgamish. And, of course, we have the story of in Genesis of Noah’s Ark.

As I see it, what is important is not the historicity of the flood. What counts is the message delivered by the story of the flood. First Jews and later Christians came to believe that God has promised to safeguard the creation.

Of course, God can only make the creation safe from divine retribution. Human beings may mess things up with a nuclear holocaust or a massive assault of the environment. But God will never destroy the earth and all who live on it. In times like today, such a promise is tremendously reassuring.

I especially like the biblical version of the flood story because God doesn’t make the covenant just with human beings. God makes it with “every living creature” to quote Genesis. God makes a promise to the birds of the air, domestic animals such as pigs and chickens, and all the other magnificent wild life on this amazing planet.

A wonderful couple, Silvia and Victor, live in an apartment in our house in Mexico. They care for the house and the garden. They also care for the many animals they and we have collected over the ten years we have been in the house. At this point in time, collectively, we have two dogs, two cats, two birds, seven fish, and one turtle (Actually, there used to be more fish until we brought home two cats and forgot to tell Silvia to cover her aquarium). One of the great joys of being down there is being surrounded by all of these animals.

We are also surrounded by animals outside the doors of our house. Our immediate neighbors have pigs, chickens, burros, horses, rabbits, turkeys, lambs and goats. It gets pretty noisy. I always warn guests that Mexico is not the best place to get a lot of sleep. But the noise is a divinely created cacophony.

As I listen to burros wheezing, goats bleating, roosters crowing, dogs barking, cats meowing, a smile always comes to my face. I am filled with a deep and intense joy at the way God has surrounded us with all of these uniquely precious animals. Given God’s promise, protecting animals has to be a fundamental responsibility of Christians.

To all of us, humans and animals, God has made a promise. “I establish my covenant with you,” said God, “that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Then God pointed Noah to a rainbow and said, “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

Interesting, isn’t it? The rainbow isn’t intended to serve as a reminder of the covenant to us, although it surely should. God wanted/needed a reminder.

It shows a bit of profound self-knowledge on God’s part. Because God has a temper. We like to explain it away because it makes us uncomfortable, as if being loving and having a temper are incompatible. But God has a temper. The rainbow helps God control that temper.

After all, when does a rainbow appear? Rainbows are created when sunlight is refracted and reflected by droplets of water in the earth’s atmosphere. They usually appear twixt and ‘tween a storm and a blue sky. They speak to the presence of storms and tranquility.

During the storms of human history, God’s anger is triggered. Watching a holocaust in Europe, Rwanda, Cambodia or the Sudan; seeing children injured and killed in Iraq, Somalia or the streets of Washington, D.C.; observing the unbridled greed of a few financiers cause so much pain and suffering for the many these days, God alternates between sadness and rage. During such times, even God needs a reminder that “this too will pass,” a reason to continue believing in the creation so meticulously crafted by God, a remembrance of the beauty humans can create when we are being beautiful.

Even though the rainbow is a reminder to God of the covenant, it can and should be the same to you and me. In a stormy time such as our time, it helps us recall that what we see about us is not the End Time. It is an all-too-human time.

Every generation faces unique economic challenges. The younger generations today face challenges far more extreme than anything my generation faced. However, all generations face periodic cycles of economic hard times.

Just in the past 30 years, whether it was the double digit inflation of the Carter years, the double digit unemployment of the first Reagan administration, the severe recession that led to the defeat of the first President Bush or today’s crisis, we regularly, consistently see times of enormous suffering and hardship. Many boomers thought we would dodge the type of economic panics and depressions our parents, grandparents and great grandparents experienced. To date, we have. But we don’t know what the next few months and years will produce.

In stark contrast to the behavior of God who keeps promises, these regular, recurring times of severe economic trouble are caused, in large part, by broken promises. In our current crisis, people running financial institutions promised to invest our money wisely. Too many of them lied. Key government leaders told us that Iraq represented a clear and present danger to our national security. They lied. We are promised a fair tax code but it has become grossly unfair. People have lied to us about what the current tax codes do and don’t do.

Perhaps most important, we lied to ourselves and each other. We convinced ourselves that property values, stocks and salaries could go up forever. Even a cursory understanding of history reveals those assumptions to be untrue.

Broken promises permeate our society from top to bottom. Parents promise to love and care for their children but when their marriage disintegrates, some parents disappear. They don’t stay involved in their kids’ lives. They don’t pay child support. They are promise-breakers.

Churches maintain that we are forgiving and caring. And yet, in too many instances, we are judgmental and exclusionary. We lie about our message of forgiveness and openness to all.

We say we want our kids to have a quality education. However, too many of us don’t want to do the educational work at home with our kids that is required for quality education to take place.

As Calvinists, we are never surprised when humans break promises. We aren’t cynical. But we know it will happen with disheartening regularity.

All the more reason to pay attention to the rainbows in the sky reminding us of God’s faithfulness. We need the reassurance that, at the heart of reality, is a promise kept, not a promise broken.

If we look carefully, we will also find rainbows generated by human faithfulness. Amidst the nitty gritty realities of our lives, 24/7, we see women, men and children being good to their word, keeping promises they have made to themselves, family members, friends, country and employers. They keep promises even when it is inconvenient or a flat-out hardship to do so.

These rainbows are generated by parents who, far from bailing out on their kids, make enormous sacrifices, moving heaven and earth to insure their kids are fed, housed and educated, working two three jobs to keep their promises; politicians working to honor the promise made to millions of workers who have been contributing to Social Security in every pay check for decades; congregations finding creative ways to sustain and even grow their ministries despite dwindling financial resources; a wife staying by the side of her dying husband even when he no longer recognizes her, fulfilling the promise “until death do us part”; despite uncertain futures with their organization, employees continuing to show up and give 100% to the work.

These are rainbows in the midst of our lives, reminding us that, not only does God keep promises, so do human beings. People like you and me do it every single day. So can we.

Indeed, at the heart of every faithful life, is a disciplined, intentional strategy to make promises worth keeping and then keep them. Nowhere is this more crystal clear than in the life of Jesus. He made a promise to love God and neighbor. Not even betrayal by close friends, the fickleness of crowds, or seeming abandonment by God could force Jesus to break his promises. To his last breath, Jesus was good to his word.

So as we begin this season of Lent, let us examine carefully the promises we have made, the promises we are making and whether or not we are keeping them. If we don’t like the results of our promise inventory, it isn’t too late to change. The beauty of the Christian faith is the fact that it is never too late to change.

Being trustworthy, being good to our word, keeping promises is the heart and soul of the Christian discipleship. Keeping promises is a one day at a time challenge. However, as we keep our promises, we will feel very good about who we are and whose we are—the children of a God whose promises are as good as God.

Let us pray: Gracious God, thousands and thousands of years ago, you made a promise to us. You have been true to your promise. Thank you. Help us as we seek to be as reliable and trustworthy as you are. All this we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen